How do you rapidly scale GenAI from concept to significant value?
Most insurers have either not started working with generative AI (GenAI) or have not moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Given the recent arrival of the technology into this industry, those businesses that are able to rapidly identify, implement and scale relevant GenAI solutions ahead of their competitors will likely capture significant value.
As a private equity-backed business, esure has established a culture alongside cutting edge technology to place itself in a strong position to lead the drive, as it naturally leans toward a “test, learn and scale what works” approach to innovation that new technology often requires. However, turning the potential of GenAI into tangible return on investment remains a challenge for any business.
esure is an ambitious personal lines insurer. Its aim is to become the leading pureplay digital insurer in the UK, creating simple and seamless customer journeys. To that end, the business has been on a three-year transformation, working with an extensive EY team to create a digital operating model underpinned by leading capabilities across their technology ecosystem.
Positioning itself as a scaled insurtech, esure aims to use its new platform to assess and adopt emerging technologies, out-innovate its competitors, and rapidly scale products that create value. GenAI is an area where this can be achieved.
esure identified an extensive range of opportunities to use GenAI to accelerate its digital transformation journey by driving efficiencies in its contact center and improve customer service. After a rapid proof of concept showed promise, the challenge was to scale the opportunity quickly but responsibly, so it could secure a competitive advantage in the market.
Driving contact center efficiency by empowering agents with GenAI
The EY team collaborated with esure to shape and implement GenAI use cases into esure’s live chat journeys, enhancing service across claims and policy management. This simplified customer and agent interactions, personalized the experience and created efficiency gains across the operation.
The first use case applied GenAI to summarize customer-chatbot and agent live-chat interactions to drive more efficient customer service and help deliver better customer outcomes. The solution ensures that when a human agent steps into the conversation they understand the customer’s intent, so can respond quickly and personably to their needs without the customers needing to repeat themselves, which is a key customer frustration.
The EY team brought a breadth and depth of capability and experience, with a true partnership approach to working together.
When the conversation is over, GenAI reduces post-call administrative tasks by summarizing all key details for the agent automatically and recording it in the system. This saves time for the agent who can focus on more valuable follow-up actions and support more customers. It ensures customer interactions are captured more consistently and accurately across esure’s global sites. It also improves future interactions with customers, thanks to more meaningful insights for subsequent agents to familiarize themselves with.
The esure and EY teams took the use cases from ideation to reality quickly by working as a single cross-functional team to shape, build, develop and deploy the solution within 12 weeks. The EY team was rapidly mobilized with a full range of capabilities from across the UK and EMEIA, which included deep knowledge of the business as well as advanced GenAI experience across a number of different markets, with a proven track record of the whole technology implementation.
The EY team alongside esure’s specialists shaped and defined GenAI opportunities during a rapid discovery phase. This included facilitating key design decisions, agreeing the scope of projects and shaping a plan that everyone could execute. They worked closely with esure’s data science and operational business leads to build the business case and substantiate the return on investment for each use case.
The team went on to implement solutions with an agile and iterative approach. Leveraging their deep knowledge of the new esure technology ecosystem, they embedded GenAI capability into customer journeys in smart ways that helped maximize performance. With iterative testing throughout to assess the solution and bring early learnings, it was deployed for live testing first with a small cohort, gaining as much feedback as possible, before scaling it across the business within four weeks.
This was conducted at pace, with minimal disruption alongside one of the most complex transformation projects and migrations in the UK insurance market.
The EY organization was a natural choice to help. Having been an integral part of esure’s multiyear transformation journey, as their trusted adviser, the EY team had worked with the business to design and build a completely new technology ecosystem, with the leading capabilities required to run an insurance business and migrating away from their legacy systems.
esure knew the EY team had genuine thought leadership and global experience in artificial intelligence (AI), across financial services and beyond. They thought that the EY team would be able to think problems through, find solutions and help deliver them. Also, they realised the EY team understood how to make change happen in their organization — the team understood the technology ecosystem inside out and how the organization worked. This meant the team could move forward in ways that were smart, pragmatic and fast.
“The EY team brought a breadth and depth of capability and experience, with a true partnership approach to working together,” says Chris Pearce, Head of Data Science at esure.
Building a GenAI factory creates transformative returns
esure’s GenAI capability has been rolled out to over 800 agents across operations and claims. It has generated over one million summarized responses to date — with every esure agent across the business now being GenAI assisted to improve agent and customer experience.
These extended capabilities have reduced average handling time for live chat customer contacts by 15%. Further substantial gains are expected as more GenAI applications are extended across the enterprise.
Now that esure has an industry leading technology platform and proven GenAI architecture in place, it can federate wide-ranging and complex uses of GenAI across the business. When this type of “GenAI factory” is established inside an organization, the return on investment becomes transformative.
esure, with the support of the EY team, is now focusing on further leveraging their market leading digital platform by quickly deploying new GenAI capabilities into business domains — scaling up the teams to work across multiple channels and functions.
Reduction of
15%in average handling time for live customer chats
This involves embedding a wider set of foundational GenAI capabilities, including governance, risk and control frameworks and responsible use of AI which keep pace with the company’s evolving use of GenAI. A successful implementation of GenAI at scale is not just about getting the technology right: Leadership needs to ensure everyone in the business is acting responsibly in the design of GenAI, practicing critical thinking and that this awareness is ingrained in the culture. It’s necessary to keep humans in the loop, especially when emerging GenAI capabilities are being built and tested.
AI has the transformative potential to unlock value across the enterprise, as esure is already experiencing. This value can be harnessed quickly and at scale, and the capabilities developed in this process can be extended to every part of the business.
